


zero gravity - what’s it like?

by ninemoons42



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Alternate Universe - Politics, Ambiguous/Open Ending, American Politics, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Porn, Angst with an uncertain ending, Blindfolds, Consent Issues, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Explicit Consent, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Mind Games, Minor Character Death, Moral Ambiguity, Morally Ambiguous Character, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Overdosing, Rimming, Rough Kissing, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Sex and Drugs, White House, accidental overdosing, fantasy american politics, the west wing walk and talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:40:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2790311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes applies for a messenger job at a White House in which his mother is permanently out of the picture, political and otherwise, and there he meets Steve Rogers, Deputy Chief of Staff in the administration of President Jane Foster.</p><p>Bucky and Steve have a complicated relationship that's compounded by a tin of drug paraphernalia, and the rules to a series of consent and sex games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	zero gravity - what’s it like?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aimhigh1006](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimhigh1006/gifts).



> Consent is already complicated out in the real world, and in this fic it gets twisted around to merry hell and then some. Basically, a character first grants full and knowing consent for any and possibly every kind of sexual activity, but then that very same character goes and gets himself good and stoned. Hence the use of both the "Explicit Content" and "Dubious Content" tags. (No non-consensual activities, implied or explicit, take place.) 
> 
> If you feel that this set-up might be triggering or might make you feel uncomfortable, please go ahead and hit the Back button, because self-care is critical and important and needed.

A needle’s kiss. The brief bite before oblivion.

He pushes the plunger home, slowly, and numbness follows where the needle goes, and there is such red on his skin when he pulls the syringe away. A bright welling drop of blood, spherical for just an instant. He makes himself reach for the first-aid kit that sits next to the tin in which he keeps - the other things. Fingers still clumsy, anticipating the high, he cleans up. He squares his things away. A fragment of an expression, something he must have heard from someone in the family or at least someone who shares his last name. A tradition of Barneses enlisting, land and sea and air, coming home covered in glory.

That is them, and this is him, shivering: waiting for the world to speed up around him. Colors sparking and kaleidoscoping. 

He has a moment to look at the door, at the windows, the locks he’s checked and double-checked, and the names and the faces fade away from him - he’s sucked down, down, into sweet hyperkinetic dizziness. Rapid eye movement, and dreaming wide awake: the urge to run and dance and shift the world on its axis. The world that he carries on his shoulders.

Lightning shrieking down his nerves. No such thing as silence in his rented room. One of his neighbors is mangling some kind of bouncy catchy pop song, and he gets up to dance, his only audience his own reflection: a chipped full-length mirror tipped precariously into the corner opposite his bed. 

He thinks he recognizes his own face. He thinks he knows how dark his eyes really are. He thinks he knows the shadows and the lines of him, the faint silvery scars.

He watches himself move, clumsy grace, colt-jointed. It hurts, he thinks, vaguely detached, to tilt his head one way, to bend his elbow another. He’s not injured, or at least, these aren’t recent injuries. Old pains and old aches that have burrowed into him and found permanent homes. 

The pain in his shoulder is new and different, because it was a pain that he had wanted, and a pain that others did not want him to have.

He stills. 

It’s been a few days since the fumes of incense and the overpowering reek of too many flowers, too much sweat, too many tears.

He knows, now, what it’s like to bear a body, or at least be one of the six to carry a body away, to lay it in earth.

His shoulder hurts, and he can still, in the unguarded moments, smell cedar. Crumpled cloth and shoe polish and candle wax, and cedar. A plain casket beneath a single wreath of flowers, red-white-blue drape. 

“No.”

He whispers, because there’re only the four walls to hear him.

“No.”

No point, no point. Why dwell on long-ago recriminations? Why remember the endless hours of playback and the vicious news cycle? 

The funeral is nine days in the past, and the world’s finally getting distracted. He doesn’t have to turn on the TV and find that face staring back at him: haughty lines. Or, worse, those lines masked in red. Eyes wide open, never to close again on their own.

And yet as if to mock him the tune coming in through the walls stutters, vanishes into an instant of white noise, before someone starts speaking and it doesn’t make sense for a dance radio station to have news bulletins, what kind of nonsense is this - 

_The investigation into the death of former President Winifred Barnes continues._

A handful of words is all he needs to remember: slow-motion high-definition pornographic clarity. 

Flowers hanging off a podium and a tablet in lieu of an idiot board. Sunlight on silver hair. That voice full of startling resonance.

And then: _crack_. 

Screams. 

A mad scramble.

“I’m maybe not stoned enough for this,” he tells his pale reflection, and he wishes he could laugh, and all he can do is go back to the rickety couch. Reach for his tin. His hands are shaking again. He misses the first stick. The second. He gets it right on the third try.

But not even this second hit so soon on the heels of the first can erase the image in his mind.

The image of his mother, felled by a sniper’s bullet. 

The same mother who had given birth to him.

The same mother who had then turned him away, over and over, all the way to the White House. Nearly all the way after. Only death had stopped her, or stopped the rest of her family.

*

**Two years later**

The young woman nods at the door that is nearly closing on her face, clutches at her forearms, walks away. She is met and escorted by a man in a dark suit, who is also wearing a flesh-tone spiral cord that bridges the gap between his collar and his ear. Such a blend of fear and hope and desperation on her face: like the sting of a hundred thousand needles, like the sharp bite of a hundred thousand bruises the exact size and shape of track marks.

He watches her go. A drop of sweat trickles into his collar. Irrationally sharp sensation. He’s certain he’s stone cold sober. There had been a mandated drug test, the results of which are even now clipped to his submitted CV and grudgingly given references - and he’d gone back for a second test, the next day - the next day that was yesterday to this today. He’s clean. He’s here. And time is passing for him in its painful normal increments.

Second after minute after hour.

Another applicant. And another. 

He jiggles his knee, suddenly, and just as suddenly stops. He doesn’t want to wreck his suit. It’s the best he’s got for this kind of appointment. 

Wired and he doesn’t know why.

He hears the scuffle and buzz of a commotion on the move before he hears his name: 

“Mr James Barnes?”

Startled faces around him. Flickers of recognition. He doesn’t want to know what other reactions there might be, and so he ignores them. He pushes the sounds of the commotion away. He’s never had any right to his mother, that was what she’d always said, but he can still do this, he’s still allowed to walk as she once did: an officer taking the helm. 

“Could I ask you to call me Bucky?” he asks, as soon as he can speak to the woman who’d called his name. She is small and she is stooped and she smells like talc and roses and the kind of ink that is stoppered into utilitarian bottles, and the lines in her face are not the lines of a frail old woman. “I’ve never really been one for my given name. Ma’am.”

“Hmm,” the woman says. A completely neutral sound. She tilts her head at him, and turns, smartly, and he has no choice but to follow.

As soon as he’s through the door that she’d indicated his awareness of the world outside these four walls fades away, because someone is looking at him, sharp and scrutinizing. Familiar and not familiar. A face now known the world over. Shrewd blue-gray eyes and a severe braid in shades of red and an artful scatter of stray silver. 

He nearly stumbles to a stop. He’s torn between standing straight up and slouching. The woman standing next to the desk doesn’t even come up to his shoulders, and that’s with the heeled shoes factored in. A perfectly neutral suit in cream and lace and summer-moss green, and all she’s missing are her decorations. He remembers the dossier and he remembers the PR fluff, the campaign materials. A civilian’s Astronaut Badge. A hundred days on the International Space Station, including a complicated spacewalk. Mission success.

The woman purses her lips. A faintly amused moue. “Everyone around here is taller than I am.”

“Can’t help my genes,” he blurts out. He almost immediately wants to cover his mouth. Shrink in disgrace. Of all the things he could have said - 

“No, no, I suppose you can’t, can you?” the woman asks. And she’s striding forward. Hand out. “Pleased to meet you, Bucky Barnes.”

“Madam President,” Bucky says. He shakes her hand. He still has an irrational urge to sit down. Towering over her is - strange. He shouldn’t be so tall. 

She smiles, then, kindly, and motions him into a chair, and he goes, with relief. This is better. He’d rather be looking up at her. He can be somewhere near _her_ eye level. “I’ve got a lot of questions for you,” President Jane Foster says, as she leans against the desk. “Starting with, why you of all the people, and why me?”

Complicated questions. She would have to begin with them. Bucky shifts, uncomfortably. How to talk about his family, and the way they were carrying on now, and his desperate need to move against them? 

“But that’s not the question I’m asking you,” the president says, suddenly, cutting off his train of thought. “We’ll start with something simple. And that’s this: Do you want to work with me?”

“I want to work for you,” Bucky says with startled alacrity. “But - I was told I was applying for a messenger position - ”

“Yes, you were, but I happened to find your CV in the stacks and I asked Mrs Dennis to come bring you up,” and President Foster nods to the woman who had ushered Bucky in. It makes him startle. He hadn’t thought she’d still be there. “As it happens, I find myself in need of someone new to talk to, who also happens to know a little something about the White House, about DC, and it seemed to me that you might fit the bill.”

Bucky blinks. “Um. Madam President - ”

“You can call me Doctor Foster, if that makes you feel more comfortable - ”

“Madam President,” he says. “I’m not exactly a, a lifer - I didn’t even come here until a couple of years ago.”

“All the better. You know something but not everything. That makes for a discussion. I could always use a discussion. It can get a little tedious, having to hear nothing but _Yes, Ma’am_ and _No, Ma’am_ day in and day out.”

“Please don’t let Mr Erik hear you say that,” Mrs Dennis says from next to the door, looking amused.

“Him _or_ Steve,” the president says, nodding. “I’ll introduce you to them as soon as I can, Bucky: that would be my Chief of Staff and his deputy,” she continues. “But as I was saying: I want a different perspective and I also want someone I can trust.”

Bucky very carefully does not bolt at those words. He’s not sure anyone should ever be able to trust him. Most days he won’t trust himself. What she’s asking of him - impossible - 

“You can count on me,” he hears himself say. 

That wins him a bright brief smile. “That’s good to hear. Welcome to the White House, Bucky Barnes.”

*

He’s gotten to be quite adept at balancing two portfolios, one large tablet, one oversized smartphone, a briefcase full of documents, _and_ a carrier tray full of towering coffee cups, and he’s gotten used to carrying the lot at a breakneck pace, weaving and ducking past hassled-looking secretaries and men in crooked ties, delivery people in drab overalls and the odd Secret Service person or two.

A now-familiar face around the corner. He puts on an extra burst of speed, walks right up to the White House Press Secretary and says, “Good morning.” 

“Morning, Bucky,” Sam says. He’s eyeing the coffee cups covetously, and Bucky can’t blame him. This is his sixth coffee run in two days, and President Foster isn’t going to Capitol Hill for another two. “Which one’s mine?”

“Blue marker,” he tells Sam, and he holds out the carrier tray just enough that Sam can pry the indicated cup out and take a long, grateful sip. 

“I really needed that,” Sam says. “And let me tell you, Bucky, I’ve thanked you for getting coffee in the past and I’m thanking you again right now. How you manage to remember these complicated orders is nothing short of a miracle.”

“Thanks, I think,” Bucky says, and then his smartphone goes off and - “Uh, you wouldn’t happen to know where Erik and the others are?”

Sam blinks. “You’re heading in the wrong direction, kid,” he says. “They moved to Sue’s office like ten minutes ago. Didn’t anyone catch you and let you know?”

“Dammit,” Bucky says, and bites off the rest of his words. He needs to stop. He needs to rest. He needs to take a deep breath. There’s no time for any of those. He has to muster the last reserves of courtesy to say, “Thanks, Sam.”

Sam doesn’t seem to notice that he’s flagging. “Any time, as long as you keep bringing me coffee,” is all Sam says as he heads for one of the elevators.

Bucky grits his teeth, turns around, starts retracing his steps. Fewer people, somehow, and he doesn’t notice, until he rounds the last corner and then nearly runs into a broad back: grandfatherly plaid in blue and black and white, one collar point stuck stubbornly up under one ear. 

“Christ,” Bucky says, softly. “Sorry, Steve.” It can only be him, after all, with those shoulders and the ruffled dark-blond hair. The smell of citrus and salt and wood, not cedar, something else, earthy burnt. 

Steve turns around. He’s got two inches, three at most, on Bucky. Storm-blue eyes, currently clouded with fatigue and three straight late nights. “I probably should be apologizing, because what am I doing here, stopped dead in the middle of the corridor?”

“Thinking,” Bucky offers, though he’s feeling far from generous as he bites the word off. 

“Among other things. I think I actually fell asleep there for a moment. Which is stupid of me, I know, give me some of those,” Steve says. And Steve doesn’t even wait for Bucky to say anything - he simply plucks the tablet and the portfolios out of Bucky’s hands. “Come on, the others will be wondering where the coffee’s got to. I don’t know how she does it. She’s still wide awake and she’s thinking better than the rest of us are.”

“If you’re talking about the president, I really don’t know why you’re so surprised. She fucking thrives on shit like this.”

“The only reason why I’m not telling you off about your language is because I agree with you.”

Bucky makes a face, half at the secretary juggling a sheaf of papers, half at Steve. “Sure, you couldn’t admit to yourself that she’s ten years your senior and she’s still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

Whatever reply Steve might make is immediately precluded by Erik sticking his head out of a conference room - silver-haired and bleary-eyed, but still in his suit - and saying, “About time, where have the two of you been? Come on, come on, don’t make us wait.”

“Sorry, Erik,” Bucky hears himself say, right on the heels of Steve’s wordless murmur, and before he can distract himself with thoughts of Steve’s voice and the taste of Steve’s sweat heavy on his tongue he’s almost running back into position, just behind President Foster and to her right, so he can hand her the coffee with her name on it. French press, two brown sugars and one dash each of cinnamon and chocolate. He’s lost track of the number of times that he’d started reeling that order off when he was there for himself, for his own coffee.

As bright as her eyes might be behind her thick glasses, Bucky thinks President Foster’s also teetering on the edge as much as anyone else in that room with them: she’s slumped over in her chair, and her hands tremble as she gratefully takes the tablet from Bucky. But she can still smile at him and say, quietly, “Thank you.”

He watches his boss fiddle with the tablet for a moment and then the diagram she’s been looking at appears on the wall-mounted displays: a chart of the members of Congress, sorted by party affiliation and current opinion/s. He’s just about sick and tired of talking about the environment, but he has to keep looking, because he’ll be asked for an opinion and the president seems to want to listen to his opinions. 

Why she wants to listen to him is something he can’t quite wrap his head around. 

But he stares at the data anyway, until it all starts to fuzz over again in his head, and he could almost want a hit, a brief sting in the crook of his elbow, if only for the short-lived fireworks frenzy of rapidfire false clarity - and then something catches his eye, and he walks right up to the displays and squints at the notes that they’ve compiled and accumulated and corrected over the past forty-eight hours.

“Talk to me,” President Foster says, almost making Bucky jump.

“Daniel Rand,” Bucky says. “He’s normally all over this kind of thing. Why’s he siding with the bad guys now? What’d we do to piss him off?”

“He’s currently at loggerheads with Stark and Potts,” Erik says. “There are parts of the bill that he claims will do more harm than good in the long run.”

“And we’ve tried to look into the relevant sections to see if we can compromise - no such luck,” Steve adds.

“What are you saying, Bucky?” President Foster asks.

“If he’s still not jumping ship back to us then we’re doing something wrong, or he hasn’t managed to understand our message,” Bucky says, and he pointedly does not look in Steve’s direction. A ghostly image just a step back from those broad shoulders, not quite sneering, but close to it. Familiar cheekbones that Bucky sees in mirrors, when he can be bothered to look at them. The Barnes presidency had not exactly been noted for its concern for the environment, and she eventually paid the price for that disregard. 

“He could influence others to support us,” Steve says.

Erik shakes his head, wearily. “Or stay on the other side and pull more people over.”

“Won’t hurt to ask,” the president says. “Get Bobbi on it.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Steve says, and he hurries out of the room.

Bucky shivers. It’s just a hunch. It could mean nothing.

It could mean everything.

*

“Come on come on come on,” on Bucky’s left.

A stoic not-quite-silence on his right. If Erik is grinding his teeth, then something is happening that is beyond his control, and sometimes he’s got Congress eating out of the palm of his hand and sometimes he doesn’t. 

This is one of those latter times.

This is one of those times when Bucky wishes he could make himself scarce - but the president is watching the overhead televisions just as avidly as Sue and all the others are, and he’s there because she’s there, and - 

“Come on,” again, and Bucky cuts a glance at the straight line of Steve’s eyebrows and shoves his hands further into his pockets.

“Are they still voting?” Sam asks. “God, I don’t know what they’re drawing it out for. This is worse than pulling teeth without any anesthesia, and we’ve all gone through that when we were kids.”

“At least pulling a tooth at that age didn’t hurt that much,” Sue retorts without looking over her shoulder. 

“Anyone order pizza?” someone says, and Bucky has to swallow back a chuckle and turn to offer help. Yukio beams at him from over the stack in her arms and waves him off. “No, no, it’s no trouble, you stay there and get ready to run for the booze, because the voting will be over any minute now and believe me, we’re all going to need it whatever the outcome might be.”

“I’d rather be drinking myself unconscious _right now_ ,” Bucky tells her. “Anything’s better than this waiting game.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Yukio says, and she doesn’t look one whit like the White House Deputy Legal Counsel, but Bucky’s watched her talk about the administration’s policies on the news, he’s listened to her demolish pundit after two-bit opinionator on the talk show circuit, and there is a reason why people step aside when they see the bright colors in her hair: rich red roots today, stark contrast to her black suit. 

“Here it comes,” Sam says as the votes are tallied and the pop-up tables appear on the screens. 

The numbers supporting them start flat and then - they start going up, in ones and twos and threes, and then in bigger numbers, until they’ve got half of Congress and still more votes are coming in.

President Foster jumps to her feet when they get the majority on her side - but it doesn’t stop there, because in the end they get two-thirds of both houses and then some, and - 

“We did it,” Sue says, and she gets to her feet and thrusts her fists into the air. “We did it!”

Cheers all around. 

Bucky consents to bump fists with Sam, a complicated production of multiple impacts, and then he has to pass Erik a glass of water when he sinks, smirking and shaking his head, into the nearest chair. 

He just wants to go home and pass out for however long the president’s going to let him.

Because this thing is done, but the work is far from over.

Yukio offers pizza and Steve is roped into helping to pass the drinks around, and Bucky catches his eye, once. Offers him a slight smile, before he’s swept up in President Foster’s wake: “Bucky?”

“Ma’am,” he says. 

“You’ve done a good job of helping me out, helping all of us out,” she says. Her hand where it rests on his shoulder trembles, slightly. “Thank you.”

“I did what I could,” he demurs.

“And what you’ve done is greatly appreciated. So you should take me seriously when I say, out,” she says with a ghost of her usual sunny smile. “Out you get and go home and sleep. I don’t want to see you here for the next three days.”

“What if you need me to help you save the world?”

Her laugh is frayed around the edges. “Insubordination! For that you’re out _four_ days.”

He precedes her out the door - he picks up her papers and her portfolio and her tablet and carefully stands between her and her Secret Service escorts. 

One corridor from the residential wing, she stops, and grabs his shoulder, and steps out of her shoes with a small and quiet sigh of utterly exhausted effort. 

He nearly offers to pick up her shoes.

But she doesn’t let him speak: she says, insistent, instead, “Don’t make me make it a week, please. I know that you’ve been spending as much time as you can here, and around the others, and I know that you’ve been learning everything that you can. What you’re doing is commendable, and maybe you think it’s necessary, and I wouldn’t dare stop you from making the most of your time here.”

“On the other hand, you want me to rest,” Bucky says.

“It _has_ been a long week, hasn’t it? And I want you to recover from it so we can meet the next problem, the next crisis, with sharp eyes and sharp minds. That goes for everyone here. Me. Vice-President Storm. My Chief of Staff and his people. And you.”

Bucky looks down at his feet. Nods, and waits with bated breath for her to leave him alone.

He keeps the poker face on until he exits through a side door and an equally sheltered pedestrian entrance: that’s when he smiles, small and blade-sharp and cynical, and mutters to himself, mutters to the shadow that the White House casts across Pennsylvania Avenue. “What she doesn’t know, right?”

*

Voices echo in his ears. 

Verse and chorus and verse again, _never going to amount to anything_ , _worse than useless_. The word _unwanted_ , and sneers and disdain and dismissal. Years of closed doors. Years of cold shoulders. Years of his own footsteps unheeded on empty stoops and empty sidewalks.

He shakes his head, roughly, and the movement does nothing to dislodge the cold claws of memory from down his spine, from around his neck, and he eyes his first-aid kit and the tin next to it. Freezing anticipation. 

He’d get started now, but that would mean he won’t get what he want, so he has to wait. He doesn’t know how long he’ll have to wait. That’s the other problem.

All he has is a text message. He’s read it. He hasn’t bothered to reply to it. That’s not how this works. 

Water drips down onto his shoulders. Soap-scent lingers on his skin. The water heater is on the fritz and he doesn’t have the strength to welcome some kind of repair-minded stranger into this house. He doesn’t want to look into a stranger’s eyes, waiting - or not waiting - for recognition to flicker. For judgment. He wears his mother’s face for good or for ill - mostly the latter - and hers had been a notorious face, plastered all over the world’s front pages, over and over again, in life and in death.

Strangers stare at him. At least he can stand their idle and often pointless scrutiny. But he’d rather hide, and isn’t that what he’s doing now? Hiding in busy corridors, hiding between rapid footsteps, scurrying in someone’s wake, hoping to stay unnoticed. 

A bath in cold water. He’s still shivering. The towels he’s wearing are worn and napped and don’t do a good job of either drying him off or keeping him warm. 

He gets up and paces and there’s music coming in from somewhere else in the building. A familiar riff. An old one. The beat of a drum and the oscillation of a chord. _I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does._

He catches himself mouthing along to the lyrics and throws himself a smile in the battered, spotted-around-the-edges mirror. A smile that is not shaped like mirth or happiness or even amusement. A smile that is shaped like a scream. A smile that is shaped like a wound. All it needs is the blood running from the corners.

A knock on the door.

Bucky swallows. Steps past his things, past the crumpled sheets and the plumped pillows, past the heaps of blankets. Puts his eye to the peephole.

Dark blue eyes and a lined face. Broad shoulders, stooped. A black leather jacket. 

“It’s me,” the man outside the door says.

Steve.

Bucky unlocks the door. Steps back.

Steve looks windblown, looks twice his age: worry sits heavily around his neck. A stone ring of a weight, pulling him down when he moves and pulling him down when he’s still. 

“Are you sure you’re Steve?” Bucky asks. “Because Steve won, you know. Because he got something he wanted. Or helped other people get what they wanted. Same difference. So why do you look like you’ve been mugged? Who kicked you into the gutter?”

A long beat of fraught silence. Steve’s hands, clenched into fists. The music dies away and now the only sounds Bucky can hear are Steve’s labored breathing, the tortured grinding of Steve’s knuckles. “I should go.”

“Sure. Do what you want.” Bucky turns his back on him. “Wasn’t even expecting you. It was a surprise to get your message.”

He makes sure he’s nowhere near visible in the mirror. He presents a certain face to people at the White House, when he’s on the job. He presents another to his boss, a little more honest than most, because it’s apparently why she’s paying him.

He presents a smile and a reckless air to Steve, when Steve is here, when Steve is playing with him. 

This is just a game.

No emotions.

So he throws himself onto the bed, face-down, and very carefully tells himself he is _not_ listening for the sounds of Steve Rogers: either coming forward or backing away.

Truth be told, it isn’t like he’d never expected this to happen: it’s just a game, and one so easy to tire of, one with arcane rules and painful ones at that. 

He could call _her_ , if Steve decides to make himself scarce. The woman who taught him the rules of this particular kind of game. She calls herself Natasha now, and he still wonders why the change, which seems major to him because he knows next to nothing else about her. A handful of kinks, the way she always hid the scar on her stomach even when playing, a smoky blue and gray eye and blood-dark lipstick. A tattoo of a black cat curled up small on her left ankle. She taught him these games and she’s still willing to talk to him, every now and then, or at least to send him a postcard for every time he’s called her and gotten no answer. Blank postcards, of course. She has more secrets than she has sarcastic smiles.

If this thing with Steve pans out tonight, he’ll do just that. He’ll call her. He’ll wait for the busy tone or he’ll wait for her voice. 

The apartment is so quiet that when the bed dips Bucky almost yells out in surprise. 

Steve’s weight next to his hip. The bed warps and shapes itself to Steve, and Bucky finds himself inclining towards Steve, too, literally, his leg having succumbed to gravity so that now he’s touching Steve, knee and thigh against the scratch and burr of Steve’s clothes. 

“I - ” Steve says. A deep breath, broken, and the sentence stops dead in its tracks.

“Are you playing or not,” Bucky asks, rough and studied. A little muffled in the pillows.

He hopes, too, that the pillows can hide the shiver in his voice. It’s a game and he’s supposed to be the board and every single piece, here to be manipulated and used at will, and he’s not supposed to enjoy touching Steve: but that’s electricity shooting up and down his nerves, a high that is not presaged by the prick of a needle into his veins. Warm iridescence, curling gently around the aches and the hurts in his mind. Insulating him.

He moves his leg away. Grits his teeth against the loss.

Consolation: whatever happens, whether Steve stays or goes, at least he has tonight. He’ll use, he’ll let himself drift off to the euphoric siren call of chemical highs scraping his nerves, and then cold turkey for the next few days, until he has to put his suit back on. 

“Bucky,” Steve says.

Bucky sits up. The towels slip on his skin. 

“Could you - do you think it might be possible for the two of us to do this without, um.” 

“No,” Bucky says. He knows what the unspoken words are.

“Why can’t we do this like it’s just the two of us?”

“Because we’re playing a game. Because we’re playing by the rules. Me and you. You’re a great one for rules, never broke the speed limit, not even for an emergency. You ought to understand.”

When Steve looks up his eyes, his face, are filled with terrible hurts. He looks older, worse, than when he’d come in - and yet he doesn’t sound angry at all, when he does manage to rasp out the words. “Like you’d know anything about that.”

“I don’t,” Bucky says. “And I don’t care. Rules are rules. You want to object, you want to stop playing, door’s right there.”

Steve just stares at him, with his eyebrows pulled together into a straight line, with the lines in his face drawing together.

The towel that he’d wrapped around his waist takes that opportunity to slip down his hips.

Something flashes in Steve’s eyes, familiar feral.

And Bucky only has time to take in a short sharp shocked breath when Steve _moves_ : the man paces the halls of the White House like he’s a metronome on the move, exact beat of his feet, the precise swing of his arms. Always controlled, always careful, always too aware of how he moves and how the world moves around him.

He’s aware right now, Bucky can see the resigned sobriety and the resigned knowledge in those eyes, but he’s neither controlled nor careful as he wraps his hands around Bucky’s throat. No pressure, none at all, but Bucky can feel the immense heat and the immense tension in those locked fingers, intimate against his skin like thorns and burrs and blades. 

Or a needle, carefully introduced into a vein.

“So let’s play this game,” Steve mutters, and only his voice is distorted: his face is drawn and lined. His eyes are absolutely lucid. “Go get your things. Go say your words.”

“Then let me up,” Bucky says or perhaps he snaps, and he pushes Steve away by the wrists and forearms. Gets to his feet. He leaves his towels behind on the bed. Not that they matter. They’re not a part of these games. 

The words are easy. “I’m sober, right now,” he tosses over his shoulder. He’s not feigning the contempt - the only thing he’s not sure about is whether that contempt’s for Steve or for himself. “I’m sober and I’m about to be - not sober. I’m about to shoot up. I’m about to dose myself with some really good drugs. So right now while I’m still me, while I’m still making sense, you should know: when this hits, when I’m doing the kite thing, you can do anything you want with me. Pretty much anything and everything you can think of or make up. Hurt me, mark me, fuck me, whatever. This is permission, right now, till I pass out, till you make me pass out. Do what you want to me.”

“Yes.” Steve sounds like he’s saying the word through gritted teeth.

So what else is new.

Bucky grabs his tin, and the bottles of alcohol and iodine from the first-aid kit. Swabs his forearm off. Familiar lines of blue in his skin, and the faint remnants of track marks, from the last time they’d played. Has it been a month, perhaps two? Well, maybe that’s why Steve’s so wound up. Whatever. He needs to stop thinking, before the drugs stop his thinking for him.

Easy enough to prepare the solution. To put the fresh syringe together. He tightens the tourniquet with his teeth. Anticipation crawls down the back of his neck, for the cocaine, for whatever Steve might have in mind. Lucid eyes, yes, but Steve’s had some - strange - ideas. 

The needle slides home. He’s cold all over for a moment, then numb - and then the bright shock hits, and he only has time to step away from the kits - 

Those hard hands, again. Not around his throat. A harsh grip on his shoulders. He’s being manhandled back onto the bed. He watches through the haze in his eyes as those hands fold a towel - where had it come from? Why did the towel smell like his shampoo? - and then, and then, he can’t see.

Blindfolded.

Steve does have some strange ideas.

Thoughts flee as Bucky is kissed. Rough, biting, tongues dueling. Steve holds him in place and kisses him, slanting their mouths together over and over again, till Bucky thinks he might start bleeding after all. He could almost anticipate the iron and the copper tastes painted onto his teeth. Steve’s thumbs in the corners of Bucky’s mouth, holding him wide open. 

Bucky hears a groan, presses mindlessly closer. His hands around Steve’s wrists until - 

“Hands down. You don’t get to touch me. I get to do what I want to you. Are we clear.”

Bucky groans again, in assent this time. He’s shivering already, head to foot, and Steve is still biting at him, kissing him so savagely. He could be a piece of meat and Steve could be the wolf trying to tear him to pieces. Chew him up, swallow him down. He’d want that, he thinks, vaguely. He’d let Steve do that.

Maybe Steve already has, and this is a repeat performance, and then there’s a jolt, there’s a softly bitten-off scream, as Steve moves from Bucky’s mouth to his throat. Teeth scraping roughly along his skin, lower. 

There’s a rule about visible marks. No hickeys where they can be seen above the collar. Steve wears suits and shirts the same as Bucky does. Steve knows where the collars stop. He can’t mark anything above those starched and pressed lines.

Everything else below that is fair game, and Bucky gasps now, arches up, shamelessly, as Steve fastens his mouth to the skin over Bucky’s sternum. Sucking over and over again, and the throb in Bucky’s nerves thrills to the wild beat of Steve’s breathing, the swipe of tongue.

Down and down. Bucky can’t see the marks Steve is leaving on him, what with the towel tied around his eyes, but he can _feel_ each mark. He can feel Steve and he can’t stop himself falling into the ferocity of that feverish touch - not even when it’s joined by teeth, not even when Steve _bites_ into the meat of his thigh - it’s so good and it’s too much and it’s not enough - it makes him fight, makes him moan: “Steve - ”

“Shut up,” Steve says.

Bucky’s teeth slam shut over the next words - words he can’t remember - and then Steve bites him again, perilously close to the juncture of thigh and groin. Pleasure and pain burning together, setting Bucky alight.

He writhes on the sheets, unsure of whether he wants Steve’s mouth on him: on the one hand, Steve gives fantastic head - on the other, teeth - and the choice is taken away from him when Steve shoves his knees further apart. A hot breath against his balls, and lower - 

“On your stomach,” Steve says.

Bucky flails to obey. The sheets are rough against his belly, against his hard cock, and he rubs frantically against that roughness until Steve strikes him, _hard_ : open-handed blow to his right hip. Bucky whines. “Need, need,” he chants, mindlessly.

“You’ll come when I tell you to. You’ll _move_ when I tell you to. Clear?”

“Yes,” Bucky moans - and then he hisses, draws in a shocked breath, because Steve’s hands are on his ass, pulling the cheeks apart without so much as a by-your-leave, and Bucky is exposed and he knows what’s going to happen, knows it and wants it and - 

Hot breath, hot mouth: Steve kisses him in the most intimate spaces of his body, and this kiss is far gentler than the ones he’d administered to Bucky’s tingling, aching mouth. Soft and coaxing, and Bucky can feel himself yielding, slowly, wanting to be taken, wanting to be used, wanting to be filled up - 

Steve licks at him, a lazy firm stroke. Once. Again. Over and over. 

Bucky whines. “Let me come let me come.”

“No,” Steve says, almost sweetly, one syllable against his rim, and Bucky shivers all over.

Steve’s tongue, again, licking insistently now, and orgasm hits Bucky, and it’s nothing at all like his chemical high: it’s a surprise, it’s a shock, it’s a lightning storm behind his closed eyes, battering his nerves.

Only as the tremors shake through him and leave him limp on the sheets does Steve draw away. 

Faint sounds nearby. Footsteps. A drawer, Bucky thinks, muzzily. The ones next to the bed. A popping sound, almost familiar. 

Bucky doesn’t protest when Steve touches his ass again: he does the opposite, pressing into that hand, shameless. Sticky slick on his skin. Steve must have found the lube. Do they have enough? The considerations unravel and fall away as Steve presses one fingertip just to Bucky’s hole. Not quite entering. The pressure, though, is a sweet weight on Bucky’s still cocaine-jagged senses, and he pushes into it, pushes onto Steve’s finger, moaning softly as though he hasn’t just come like a car crash.

“Don’t stop,” Steve orders, so very softly. “Keep taking it.”

Sweet burn, sweet stretch. Bucky works himself onto Steve: one finger, then two, then three; and then Bucky fucks himself on those unmoving fingers, writhing and gasping and needing, so much, so much. He says it out loud: “Fuck me, Steve.”

“You’re doing a good job of it on your own.”

“Please,” Bucky gasps, and then he pulls away from Steve. He’s empty; he’s unfulfilled. Teetering on the precipice. “Please.”

No response.

The silence stretches for what feels like minutes.

Bucky raises his hand, prepares to take his blindfold off - 

“No,” Steve says. The word isn’t detached. Isn’t even an order of any kind. “Please keep it on.”

Bucky puts his hand down.

And then Steve’s moving him, putting him on his back. Making him spread his legs. The blindfold stays in place as Steve pushes into him, inch by excruciating inch. Steve is hard and hot and huge and Bucky can’t help but clench around him, but Steve isn’t moving. 

“Steve,” Bucky says.

Another pause, and then: “Yeah.” 

Steve fucks him, and Bucky is inundated by Steve: the salt of his sweat and the soft rattle of his belabored breaths, the frantic press of mouth to mouth, as though one of them were drowning - or both of them were. Hyper-clarity, in the maelstrom of drugs in Bucky’s veins and the powerful thrust and roll of Steve: he can see the tears in the corners of Steve’s eyes, tears that are falling onto his own cheeks, onto his own skin. He only has to press his fingertips lightly against Steve to feel the roar of Steve’s pulse, discordant rhythm against his own, the two of them in a syncopated struggle for the finish, coiling and coiling and catching the two of them up, tangling them together.

Steve goes still, suddenly.

Bucky catches his breath, and says, “Come for me.” Hoarse words, a bare whisper of sound, but they’re spur and lashes to Steve, who cries out and thrusts again, wild and uncoordinated, and then comes with a gasp.

And it’s not the first time that Steve’s orgasm has triggered Bucky’s, but it’s a surprise every time: what is it exactly that lashes their responses together? Why does Steve’s kiss rouse him, and why does Bucky’s touch - sullied as it is, as it has always been, as it must be - make the hairs on Steve’s arms rise? 

Steve’s weight presses upon him in the aftermath, in the receding tides of temporary bliss both chemical and physical.

What happens, tonight, should he fall asleep? He’s woken up to Steve sitting next to him, squinting and nodding at the screen of his smartphone; he’s woken up all by himself, cleaned up and alone and with nothing but the dwindling crash of his pulse in his ears.

It’s just a game, Bucky thinks, as he lets himself be seduced by the undertow of sleep.

A game without any winners or losers.

*

Bucky stands at the bottom of the stairs and wishes, really hard, that it were possible for him to say no.

Except that, well, the person asking him to come up one more time, _just one more time, please, you can spare me a few minutes,_ is his boss. Is POTUS. He serves at her pleasure. The words are literally in the contract he signed - and apparently they’re the same words that everyone else in the White House lives by.

There’s been a crisis and there’s been a response. A wide-ranging expose of clandestine dealings by a major federal agency. Jane Foster has studied the matter and Jane Foster has spoken to the people of the United States about the matter and what she intends to do about it. 

And Bucky has no idea whether he ought to be relieved or annoyed, because the federal agency in question’s been pulling this kind of shit since his mother was here, since the very beginning of her administration. 

Any excuse to throw a deuce in the general direction of his mother’s so-called hallowed memory.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, and he’s less disheveled today - he’s actually still wearing his suit jacket. “Something wrong?”

Bucky takes a step back from the staircase. It’s a squeeze for two to walk abreast. He gestures grandly, motioning Steve up and, maybe, hopefully, away. “Is lollygagging in the White House a crime, now?”

“You know the answer to that question about as much as I do,” Steve says. “I mean, sure, we marathon _The X-Files_ and ask the White House Executive Chef to send up her crazy popcorn experiments, but that’s research, right? And Erik has a foosball table in his office and Yukio’s got the darts board, and that’s still not counting what I found in my desk this week, I need to ask whose poker set’s missing a DEALER chip - we’re in a stressful environment and we need to unwind every once in a while, although maybe not in the week before the State of the Union. So - us? Lollygagging? Of course not.”

How Steve is still straight-faced when he shrugs, Bucky has no idea - but he sighs and gives in to the inevitable, and he takes the first three steps up the staircase in a single quick bound that leaves his knees protesting.

“This is my tenth trip up,” he tells Steve’s trailing footsteps. The corridor throws his voice back in cold echoes. “Or maybe it’s the fifteenth. I’ve lost count. I’m thinking maybe POTUS should just woman up and tell me _why_ she wants me hanging about on this particular day. I mean, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

Before Steve can respond, Bucky thrusts the door open, and the step forward nearly becomes a step backward, back and back and falling into the safety of the stairwell.

Camera flash, reporter clash, press passes and smartphones and questions.

He can’t do this.

He remembers being hounded. He remembers getting dressed in an awful haphazard way, running for his life, hands up to hide his face.

All those names thrown at him. “By-blow” is only marginally more polite than “bastard”. Those words, in conjunction with the adjective “presidential”. The years of denials. Disowned over and over again. Reminded over and over again. His own face, a softer reworking of hers, more cheekbone less forehead, and the eyes that had come from the father he’d never known.

Bucky’s cold and hot and cold all over, and he snaps the door shut, and there is a hand on his elbow - he throws it off. Lurches into the nearest wall. His hurried lunch - cheap curry and rice from a two-bit mock-Japanese eatery three blocks away - attempts to crawl back up into his throat, and out in a brown sauce-sodden mess.

“Bucky!” 

Hand over mouth. Frantic heart. Blind step. Staircase? Why is he standing at the top of a staircase? 

“Bucky!”

Blink. Confusion-sparks in his eyes. Focus. He knows the person who’s calling his name.

Steve.

“Hey, stay with me,” Steve is saying. He looks afraid. He looks disgusted. That last is not a surprise at all. Bucky can’t even bear to look at himself in the mirror six days out of seven. He hates his own face. Hates his own existence, loves and hates the drugs by turns. 

Steve’s just expressing the general sentiment, isn’t he? Who would want to associate with the illegitimate son of an assassinated unpopular president? Dust and fallen leaves piling up on an unvisited grave. 

“Bucky,” Steve says again.

“Go away,” Bucky says.

“And then POTUS’s gonna come looking for me, asking me if I’ve murdered her PA and stashed him in some out-of-the-way cabinet. No. Come on.”

“You don’t get to order me around,” he says. “And I’m not going out to see that pack of fucking vultures.”

“There’s a way around them.”

“Then go take it. I’m not going to be here. I am going out. I am going home. I am going to lock the door. POTUS can come for me then and fire me.”

“I said, there’s another way,” Steve says, but the patience in his words is fraying, and there’s a darkness in his eyes that Bucky’s seen before, and it’s Steve in his suit and tie saying those words, Steve in the White House looking like that, and Bucky can’t deal. Can’t process. 

Bucky lets himself be grabbed and led back down the stairs. A twist of service corridors, a handful of Secret Service agents, one or two puzzled-looking women in white coats heading back toward one of the White House kitchens.

“I didn’t know there were places like this in the White House,” Bucky says, because the silence of the corridor echoes and echoes unpleasantly in his head, like the aftermath of the drugs, like coming down violently from a high. “I didn’t grow up here. I was never invited. I was always turned away. I never got in until a couple of years ago. Had to go on one of those fucking tourist trap follow-the-leader shit things.”

“If it’s any consolation, Erik’s been here since before Foster and he’s still getting lost,” Steve mutters. He sounds distracted. Is he counting the doors? There are a lot of them, in this gray space with the pipes snaking overhead.

“Are you sure Erik only gets lost here? I heard about the thing,” Bucky babbles. “Him and those other guys. From the legal department. Before Yukio. Sisters. Or cousins. Got lost somewhere in the Great Lakes area.”

“Carol and Kamala,” Steve says. “In their defense, they knew where they were going and Erik just kept insisting on his so-called shortcuts. He doesn’t navigate now when we go on the road. I make Sam sit on him.”

“Good call,” Bucky says, faintly. He’s still battling nausea. The repetition of door and pipe and corridor corner isn’t helping. “Are we lost.”

“No.” As if to underscore the point, Steve grabs a doorknob, twists it to the right, and then - carpet. Click-clicketing and soft conversations, and the raised eyebrow of Mrs Dennis. 

“Boys. Are you lost,” she asks.

“That’s what I said,” Bucky says, not quite under his breath.

“We were on our way in to POTUS and then - press corps,” Steve clips off. “Who let them in this far?”

Mrs Dennis’s other eyebrow goes up. She now looks - concerned. “Sam won’t like that.”

“Yeah, well.”

“I will have him paged,” Mrs Dennis says, and Bucky watches as she glances at the pimply kid in the suspenders, who promptly bolts from his chair and out the door.

“Thanks,” Steve says. “And sorry for barging in.”

“You get one pass,” she says. “Not you, Barnes. You can pass through any time you want.”

“Thank you,” Bucky says, weakly, and he stumbles after Steve. The carpet beneath his feet is pristine and unmarred by a hundred shoes and too many camera tripods. 

“There you are,” President Foster says, when Bucky finally pushes into her office on Steve’s heels. The smile on her face turns into a frown. “What happened?”

“Press,” Bucky mutters.

“Oh. Right. I apologize,” she says. 

Bucky shakes his head. “Um.”

“I have something to take your mind off that,” she offers. 

“Can I come?” Steve asks.

“Since you’re here, why not,” President Foster says, and she comes to stand before Bucky. “Take a minute,” she says. “Breathe. In. Out. Steady.”

He does as he’s told.

“Okay,” he says, eventually.

“Come,” the president says, and he follows her, not even faltering when he finds himself walking onto the carpet of the Oval Office. There are people clustered next to the Resolute desk. A flash of tweed, a houndstooth hem, an incongruous leather jacket in battered dark blue. 

And then: “Oh, Madam President,” says a voice, a voice that Bucky knows, though the last time he’d heard that voice it had been distorted by static and gravity and a sickening lurching view of clouds and lightning tumbling. The roar of rockets. “There seems to be a delay of some kind - we were expected at our next appointment ten minutes ago - ”

“I might have something to do with that,” President Foster says. “I did mention inviting you to stay for dinner.”

“We’d love to.” Another familiar voice, heather and moors, windswept Scottish, and curly corkscrewing hair to match. “But, alas, duty calls.”

“Surely you can spare me a few minutes.”

“Of course, Madam President,” the woman says, and there’s her smile, famous and slightly crooked and guileless bright. Hands that seem equally at home waving to the press and demonstrating the strange hilarities of spaceflight and weightlessness and science. 

“Besides, when are we going to stand in this place again?” the man says, crooked self-deprecating quirk of an eyebrow. 

“You will,” President Foster declares. “You’re going back out there and you’re coming back here and I will throw you a big party next time, out in the Rose Garden. I take care of my own. You two know that.”

Bucky knows his cheeks are flaming red and he really wishes he could do something about it, except that POTUS is turning around, is looking over her shoulder, is tilting her head at him in the way that he knows means “Come”, and he does - whereupon she says, “I’ve been a fan of the two of you, you know that, since before we were all up there together. And truth be told, I wouldn’t be the only one - there’re a lot of us walking around these rooms. Here’s one of them. His name’s Bucky Barnes. Bucky, these are Jemma Simmons and Leo Fitz, from the International Space Station and the recent Stargazer and Shepard missions.”

“Call me Simmons,” the woman says, “and he’s Fitz to you, don’t listen to what anyone else says. We’re always happy to meet other people who are as interested in science and space exploration as we are, right, Fitz?”

“Right,” and Fitz steps forward, grabs Bucky’s hand in both of his own. A vigorous handshake, calluses and scars, and a smile that doesn’t seem practiced or calculated, for all that Bucky’s seen it in the newspapers and on the Internet - a bright smile, sincere, patient, and welcoming.

And then Fitz steps away, and Simmons takes his place, and Bucky’s expecting to shake her hand, too.

Bucky’s not expecting her to tilt her head at him and then pull him into her surprisingly strong slim arms, holding him close, and she smells like fresh laundry and bright lilies, like cinnamon rolls and, strangely, iodine and soap suds.

He doesn’t know where to put his hands. He pats his fingertips, awkward and shy, between her shoulders. She’s not that much taller than President Foster. She has such a strong grip on him that he can’t help but sag into her - only for a moment - he springs away and knows he’s red in the face. “Um.”

Simmons only smiles some more. “I know who you are,” she says. “You left us such a nice comment on that video we did with coffee and tea in space - I remember I hadn’t wanted to respond to it for such a long time, because I needed to find the right words and I couldn’t! Oh, how you left me speechless. You are lovely and Fitz and I are grateful for your support. It’s people like you that keep us going.”

Bucky opens his mouth, and no words come out. Not a sound. 

“You’re so very, very kind,” Simmons finishes, and then she comes up on tiptoe and kisses his cheek, and then she steps deftly past him, steps deftly into the conversation that Fitz and Steve are apparently having.

He shuffles his feet, uncertain, and he’s left feeling even more unmoored when President Foster walks past him, seemingly on her way out of the Oval Office, and pats his shoulder. An approving whisper. “You’re a good person, Barnes.”

One by one, or in small groups, the others leave, as well - Fitz and Simmons laughing quietly as they follow an escort of blue-jacketed women out the door, and Steve muttering happily to himself as he looks down at a piece of paper in his hand - and when Bucky blinks and looks up and finds himself facing the desk, with no one else to distract him, he has to stifle a cry, he has to turn and run.

Again that urge to throw up. Again that urge to core himself out, to deny everything. Kind words? An embrace from a woman he admires? A handshake from someone millions of people from all over the world look up to? He chokes on POTUS’s voice, her approval. 

No, no, no. They’ve got it all wrong. He’s no good. He’s nothing, he’s the dust under their feet. 

How he makes it back to his apartment he has no idea. How he manages to find what he needs, blind and gasping as if he were drowning, he doesn’t know. The needle _hurts_ , going in, this time. Tears running down his cheeks even as the euphoria hits, spinning him free of his fear, spinning him free of the memory of kindness.

More. He needs to forget. He prepares another shot. His hands shake. 

A third shot.

No one should be kind to him. 

Kindness feels like blows and a gift he’s stolen from others who deserve it. 

He shakes and heaves violently, and nearly misses the vein, and the third shot is too much - he blacks out, and some part of him is grateful, because he has no idea what to do with kindness, because he doesn’t want shouting and harsh words and rejection but that’s all he’s ever known, because he’s offered himself and gotten nothing but scorn and disdain in return - 

*

He struggles to open his eyes.

Darkness on all sides, pinning him down, filling up his lungs - he can’t breathe - 

He tries to scream, and no sound comes out.

He tries to move and he can’t lift a finger, can’t turn, can’t run - 

There’s a needle in his arm. It’s still there. He’d been overtaken by the drugs before he could take it out. 

Wrong wrong all of this is wrong - 

Who is he? Where is he? He knows what he’s done - but what has he done wrong?

He flails and thrashes, tries to breathe. Gasps and desperate sounds that couldn’t even be called words. He needs help. He’s all alone. He’s not okay - 

He might have finally done it this time - 

Is that relief filling him up? Is that despair or hope in the darkness that wraps around him? Escape? If he bites it now, if he gives up, will anyone know? 

POTUS might know. POTUS’s staff. Mrs Dennis’s stern slice of a smile. The bags of loose sag beneath Erik’s eyes. Sam and the tasteful running shoes he wears with his tailored suits - how it’s possible for those neon-colored monstrosities to be tasteful, no one knows, but he does it anyway. Vice-President Storm’s tea order, nearly taken right out of _Star Trek_ , only with three sugars. Yukio killing everyone else at foosball and poker, but being lethally incompetent at darts. 

Steve Steve Steve.

Steve who smiles when Bucky walks into a room and who frowns when Bucky’s telling him to do whatever he wants. 

_You won’t be missed._

Not their words. These are older words, older wounds, and Bucky thinks he might have never stopped bleeding, not since he first heard them and not since he first understood them.

Famous, notorious mother. Mother who never came to him. Mother who never looked at him. Mother who turned him away. Even in death she cast him aside. His name isn’t in her will and never was.

_Winifred Barnes was shot today as she was giving a speech in support of one of her favored charities -_

_Winifred Barnes, a divisive President -_

The only words he’d ever known from his mother who’d been President had been painful words, hurtful words, and that had set the tone for the rest of his life. For the rest of him.

_You’re no son of mine - I put you here on this earth and that’s all there is to it._

Maybe she’d led him straight astray.

Drugs, and mistaking bites and bruises and blood for pleasure, and blanket permission that included “Hurt me” and “Please me” in close conjunction.

There’s a needle in his arm and he’s gasping for breath and there are faces and words flashing past, memories of slamming doors and standing behind President Foster at the Rose Garden. A vicious strike across the face and the hard weight of a shovel in his hands. Sitting around the fireplace in Steve’s office and shooting the shit with Erik’s secretaries, and getting called away by POTUS - to nothing more urgent than sharing a late dinner of fried chicken and waffles and coleslaw and iced tea.

The touch of Steve’s hands after a night together, always conscientious, always careful. Cleaning him up. 

If there had ever been anyone he might have tried to want - would it have been Steve? Because they work in close proximity and Steve always looks in on him, almost as much as POTUS herself does. Because Steve has used him and hurt him and patched him up. Because Steve has guided him away from the White House press corps.

Bucky gasps in a breath. Gasps in the darkness. It floods down his throat and he chokes, fights, and swallows - 

His name. Someone is calling his name. 

Bucky listens until he can’t.

Until there’s nothing.

All he’s ever been.

*

_He doesn’t remember breaking Bucky’s door down - he just remembers yelling into his phone, yelling for an ambulance._

_Bucky’s body, splayed out on the floor at the foot of his bed. An obscene parody, a perversion, of every night they’d spent together, with Bucky riding the edge of his high and Steve riding the razor of permission and consent and the lack of both and neither. Bucky’s winter-blue eyes, blank and lifeless; Bucky’s pulse, trembling and fluttering weakly._

_Steve doesn’t feel the tears on his cheeks, doesn’t connect them to the spots on the blanket wrapped around Bucky’s near-lifeless form: he just watches them grow the longer he’s glued to Bucky’s side._

_Bucky has no one listed as next of kin. Steve resorts to his ID, resorts to a phone call from Erik. Even so, the nurses look askance at him, look askance at his hand holding Bucky’s._

_He can’t make himself let go of Bucky’s hand._

_Fear heaves through him, sickening lurching waves. Fear and guilt and shame. There are rational explanations for each feeling, he knows, and he knows he’ll never be able to explain himself._

_Never stop blaming himself._

_Bucky. Where does he even begin?_

_Steve flinches as he follows the doctors into one of the small ICU rooms. The beep and hiss of life support. He’s been through this before._

_He shouldn’t go. He can’t stay._

_Bucky is pale and cold and too, too still on the sterile white of the hospital bed. Needles tapped into his veins. Different needles. Machines keeping him alive._

_Hours pass, hours Steve doesn’t notice, until Bucky seems to rouse, seems to open his eyes._

_He wants to say Bucky’s name. Wants to show Bucky he’s here._

_Bucky seems to see him._

_Bucky shakes his head._ No no no.

_Steve waits for him to fall back into unconsciousness. Fear and guilt and shame, and now the need to get away._

_When the nurse comes in to check on Bucky, Steve lurches to his feet, and leaves, and he doesn’t look back._

*

Flowers at his bedside and a basket of bright brilliant oranges, and a series of notes, carefully tucked into envelopes or roughly folded in half. Names and familiar handwriting. The note from POTUS is on official stationery, but there’s no trace of official-looking impersonal inkjet-print. The words on the page are hurried scribbling. 

_When you’re well, come right back. We’ll be waiting for you. Take care of yourself. JF_

The nurse looks pinched around the eyes, and Bucky has to steel himself for her disapproval, but since he doesn’t know how he got here in the first place, he has to ask: “Who brought me in?”

“You shouldn’t be concerning yourself with such questions,” and if the reply isn’t exactly quelling it’s not encouraging either. “You should concentrate on getting well. It’s been noted on your chart that you’ve been using for some time now. Someone will be along to talk to you about rehabilitation.”

One of the other nurses refills the water carafe on his nightstand. He’s been using the water to keep the flowers alive a little longer. Droplets catch the weak sunlight. 

“Am I allowed to eat anything yet?” Bucky asks, eyeing one of his IV drips, eyeing the oranges. Yukio’s name on the card, graceful calligraphy. 

“I think you just need another day or two to recover, and then - we’ll see. The doctors think you might make a full recovery, but there’s no need to go borrowing trouble, is there?” This nurse seems more sympathetic than the other. “Here’s your mail.” 

More notes. He has to smile because the note from Sam is actually a smudged printout of a selfie, and sentences roughly scrawled across the bottom of the sheet. _You better get better or else I’ll go there and I’ll drag you right to my mother’s house and she’ll mother-hen you into getting better. The food’s real good and she gets like a thousand channels of cable and - well. Maybe that’s not such a hardship after all. When do you want me to get you out?_

Letters and messages, flowers and fruit, and one glaring absence. Omission.

Bucky waves back, weakly, when the second nurse waves and slips out the door, and then he falls back against his pillows. The slight movement has taken all the energy he has left.

There’s a window next to him, and the sun slants warmth and pale weak rays onto his side, and he doesn’t know how he’s here and alive.

He doesn’t know where Steve is.

He struggles to sit up. Struggles to stand on his own two feet. Struggles to make sure the IV lines don’t get pulled out. He has to take a deep breath of the oxygen being piped into his system. It feels strange to have to wear a nasal cannula, but he’s grateful to be breathing at all.

He’d had doubts about being missed. The words he’s left behind on the bed tell him otherwise. There is a signed photograph of Fitz and Simmons; there are jokes, there are links to silly videos. Hard to believe them, but there they are anyway, printed and written and otherwise. Maybe they’ll be enough to fight off the constant echo of the familiar familial voices. Maybe not.

But it’s good to have those words.

One foot in front of the other, slow and a little difficult, and he reaches out to the blinds, tries to summon the strength to draw them up and away - 

He squints at the world outside his hospital room. Outside the confines of the ICU. Watery-gray skies, like a film of clouds over the pale sun. A tree waving its half-empty branches at him, softly bending in a breeze he can’t feel, and on the sidewalk beneath the tree - 

Broad shoulders. Ruffled dark-blond hair. Hands in pockets and face turned up in a complicated grimace, the faraway glitter of tears - 

Bucky puts his hand to the glass. Whispers, “Steve.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is my gift to [actuallysebastianstan](http://soldiersteve.co.vu/) for the Stucky Secret Santa Exchange 2014. I was asked for something with lots of angst and smut and possibly Bucky doing drugs like whoa, and there were mentions of Political Animals that eventually led to mentions of The West Wing, and - well, this is the result: a sort of mish-mash of these two ideas with the characters of the Avengers (comics-verses and MCU alike).
> 
> The title was taken from the song ["Gravity"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV6OCCR4qlA), the ending theme of the anime series _Wolf's Rain_. 
> 
> Huge thanks and lots of love to [luninosity](http://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity) for looking this over for me.
> 
> \-----
> 
> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


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